The Shattered Sphere

Thirty-one The Autocrat Departs

The Mind of the Sphere felt a second strange pulse move through the wormhole web, a rough, crude movement through the net. Then, shortly thereafter, a third pulse this one coming from outside, somehow, from a wormhole aperture no Charonian had ever formed. But like the first two illicit wormhole transits, this one terminated in the default link station in the dead system—the same link point the Mind had sent its own forces through, the same link point the Adversary was driving for.

Were these passages some strange new scheme of the Adversary? The Mind’s fears were instantly aroused. It examined the records of the link in more detail. No, no. This was not the Adversary. It was all too coarse, too crude, too awkwardly done, too cautious.

But it was something. Something to do with the strange troubles that had surrounded the last world brought into the Multisystem, such a brief time before. For a moment, the Mind considered the idea of destroying that world now, as a precaution, and expending the massive energy needed to bring another planet forward to serve as a projectile weapon.

But no. That would drain its energy reserves to dangerously low levels. And these were such small and weak interlopers. Certainly there had to be more frugal means to defend against them, if need be. Surely it would make more sense to conserve its projectile planet, keep it for its intended use.

Besides, the Mind could always destroy the troublesome planet later, after all this was over.

There was a lot going on. Communications to establish with NaPurHab, navigation setting to work out, observational procedures to work out, once they figured out what they were looking at. But Gerald was happy to let the captain and the comm officer dicker and bicker with NaPurHab and sort out the rest of it. He had a ship to manage.

He quickly confirmed what he had been hoping for—the ship was safe, at least for the moment. No damage from the wormhole transit, none of the handful of SCOREs in the neighborhood showing any hostile intent, and no other danger on the immediate horizon.

He punched up the intercom and set it to general announcement. “This is the executive officer,” he said. “All sections, secure from special shifts and resume normal shift rotation. Resume normal watches. Everybody get some rest.”

They had made it. They had gone through the wormhole, and not so much as a scratch on the paint job. Gerald glanced toward the main screen as the tracking officer put up a live feed of NaPurHab. It was little more than a sharp-edged spot in the screen at this range. Dianne already had headphones on, no doubt talking to the Maximum Windbag himself.

The passage must have been much tougher on the hab. It had to take some real courage to take her through, Gerald told himself. We had it easy. The Terra Nova was much newer and smaller and more compact, built more robustly and maintained with much more care than the hab.

Gerald smiled to himself. The Terra Nova and NaPurHab had just crossed into the unknown, and he was thinking about comparative maintenance schedules. But after a passage like that, it was time to get things back to as near normal as possible as fast as possible. To every thing, there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven, Gerald reminded himself.

But they were suddenly some unknown number of light-years from Earth, and some rather disturbing questions appeared, unbidden, in Gerald’s mind. This far from home, were they indeed still under heaven? And unto what purpose—unto whose purpose—was this time to be given?

“Okay, that’s a lock,” Windbag said to the commlink. “See your team in our maxmeet shop, twentyfour from now.” The Windbag cut the commlink to the Terra Nova and sighed.

He punched up the stern exterior camera shot and was rewarded with a view of the TN with the Charonian wormhole control ring behind it. Nice looking ship, but that was not exactly the key factor here. The Windbag found himself wishing bigtime he did not have to deal with a ship full of straights just now. He knew he shoulda been slap-happy glad to get ’em. Like to get heavily lonesome in these parts, and NaPurHab could use all the help it could git. The TN had all kinds of hardware and braintrust types who knew how to run things. Evenso, now wuz not-time for distractions. He had enough on his plate without the TN screaming for attention.

But still they had to have a maximum meet, all the honchos and honchettes. They had to slap together some way of surviving out here, and plain-fact-one was that they were gonna need each other.

But that didn’t make it fun.

Sianna looked around herself and realized that she had blundered onto the Boredway again. How many wrong turns could one person make? Quite a few, as it turned out. The whole hab was a madhouse.

Boredway was anything but boring at the moment, as tangled in frantic activity as an overturned ant heap. The air was filled with the smells of burnt insulation, sweating bodies, hot metal, and bonding chemicals, a tech crew just down the way trying to repair something while a cargo crew was struggling to make sense of the cargo canisters that had been strapped in any which way in the aft sections of Boredway. A few hundred meters forward, some sort of protest group was forming up. God only knew what they were protesting— or whom they were protesting to.

Sianna decided to risk a shortcut through Loopaway turf. If she could avoid any more wrong turns, it would cut twenty minutes off her trip.

She remembered the old joke about time being nothing more than nature’s way of keeping everything from happening all at once. For a while, it seemed as if it didn’t work this side of the wormhole. It had been a busy few days.

The captain of the Terra Nova and her executive officer had come aboard, looking more than a bit disoriented—understandable, considering they had both spent the past five years aboard one ship. Of course, NaPurHab would be disorienting no matter where you came from.

There had been another energy burst the day before—a multiple one this time—as the “object” slammed into a half-dozen SCOREs at once, with every scope on the hab and the Terra Nova watching it. The object was tracking closer and closer, heading right for the wormhole.

The object. It was coming this way, at high velocity. And when it got here, it was going to force open the wormhole and kill the Multisystem, and that would kill the Earth.

Oh God. How to stop it. How to stop it? Or were they just going to have to sit here and watch it happen?

At least life was chaotic enough to take her mind off things. Somewhere in the swirl of comings and goings, in between Purpgroups of this or that philosophy, while the frantic repair crews were rushing to patch up the systems that had been damaged in the passage of the wormhole and the tech teams were juggling like mad to keep the hab working with the solar collectors suddenly delivering a third less power than before, it had all turned from strange to familiar. Sianna had gotten used to it all, and that scared her.

Sianna stopped at the turning that always got her muddled and hesitated a long moment before taking the middle way. Yes, this was the right way. She recognized the stain on the wall. Straight along this way, then down two levels, and she’d almost be there.

Oh, it had been a time, with all the big events seeming to produce little ones in their wakes. A riot or two had broken out, a sit-in had been staged in the Maximum Windbag’s office. Meantime, certain residents of both ship and hab had decided on a change of scenery. Two dozen Purps had applied for crew positions on the Terra Nova, while twice that number of the TN‘s crew had applied for Naked Purple citizenship, which was a great nuisance, as the Purple Citizen’s Council had ruled there was no such thing as a Purple Citizen three years before and then disbanded.

Ah. Here it was. I BALLS ONLEE. Someone had changed the spelling again. She pulled open the hatch and went in. Wally was lost to the outside world, buried in some sort of elaborate simulation of the incoming object. It seemed to be running on every screen in the room, from a different viewing angle on each one. Eyeball was on the comm to someone, cursing them out with alarming skill and virulence as she compulsively neatened her immaculate work station. There were Solitude and the Shattered Sphere out the viewport, glaring down on them.

Sianna sighed happily and sat down at her own station. Scary to think that a scene like this could be the most comfortable and familiar thing in her life—but then, you always had to work with what you had.

Sondra Berghoff was scared, and trying not to show it. Plans and theories were all very well, but reality was a bit trickier. Hanging in space, the nose of the Autarch pointed straight at the Plutopoint black hole, she could no longer see the slightest logic to sending a ship through the wormhole. Yes, they had some important information. Couldn’t they have just scribbled a note, stuck it in a bottle, and tossed it through the hole?

She sat strapped into her chair on the main deck, right behind the ship’s pilot. She didn’t even know the man’s name, or the names of any of the Autarch’s five crew members. All of them were nameless, faceless, utterly taciturn, and sworn to unquestioning obedience to the Autocrat.

She had not seen any of them show any facial expression except something midway between a poker face and rigor mortis. Robots showed more in the way of reaction.

Suppose they couldn’t immediately dock with the Terra Nova or NaPurHab for some reason, and she was stuck with these guys for a month or two? Suppose the Charonians or the Adversary had destroyed the big ship and the hab, and she was marooned with these guys for life?

Well, at least the crew members weren’t the only ones on board. She turned and looked to her right, to the Autocrat. There were at least some signs of life and thought in his face. A strange man, to say the least, but at least he was capable of conversation.

She looked over to Marcia MacDougal, and Larry. A miracle they were here. No doubt if anyone survived long enough to write history books of the period, the books would record how those two had come along because they were experts in gravitation and Charonian language. That was even accurate, as far as it went.

But it wasn’t true, of course. They were here because they had to be. Look at the expressions on their faces. Both staring straight ahead, tense, alert, expectant. Marcia was going in search of her husband. And Larry. Larry was going in search of what he always sought, and would never find. Absolution.

Sondra turned back to the main viewscreen and watched what the others were watching—the image of the Ring of Charon. They were face-on to the Ring, its running lights a hoop of blue diamonds in the dark, the Ring itself a perfect circle in the sky. No change yet, but it would come soon.

Too soon. Why in the hell had she felt so honor-bound to go along on this ride? Why wasn’t she back on board the research station where she belonged, feeding numbers to the computers?

The Ring’s running lights dimmed, went out, and re-lit in blood red. Stand-by. Almost ready. The team would be loading the last of the command strings to the Ring. A faint patch of dimness appeared at the centerpoint of the Ring, just barely visible at first and then almost fading out. Were they having trouble getting the lock? But then the luminous spot grew brighter, larger, stronger, rippling with power. Yes, yes, it was working.

The center of the nimbus grew darker, harder, more focused—and then flared over into a strange un-blue-white and settled down, rock-hard and solid.

The Autarch’s engines fired, and the ship moved forward, straight for the hole in the sky and whatever lay beyond.

Down a wormhole, Sondra told herself. Down a human-made worm-hole. Good God. She could not even begin to sort out the emotions that washed over her. Fear, excitement, pride, astonishment, panic, and half a dozen others all mixed up together. They were going in. They were going in.

Just before they reached the wormhole, the Autocrat turned to Sondra and smiled. “I expect,” he said, “that it will be an interesting trip.”

The Windbag stared out the viewport in his office, not at the Shattered Sphere or at Solitude, but at the Ring that ran the wormhole they had come through. The wormhole was where the action was, no doubt. The Windbag was worried, and getting more so. What the hell to do? Colette and Sturgis’s objectional “object” was on a collision course with the wormhole. Leetle invisible thing was killing every SCORE in its path. Could it really kill Sphere? Sounded loony, even if their charts and graphs looked real, even if Eyeball said they were on the money.

But what to do about it even if the “object” wuz real deal? How was a hab full of headbangers scraped off the walls of every town on Earth gonna stop an invisible object that converted SCOREs to guacamole?

The Windbag was at that melancholy point in his reflections when there was a flare of un-blue-white light from the wormhole. The Windbag frowned. Another SCORE? Thought the last of them had come up. Too damn far away to get a visual at this range. Maybe the radar johnnies could tell him something. He had his hand out to punch up the codes and ask them, when the screen blanked and presented a live radar image. The caption line reported that the imagery was coming from the TN.

His intercom warbled, and the Windbag slapped at the accept switch, knowing who it had to be before he heard a word. The woman had been checking in about a million times a minute.

“Bossman, you got eyelock on screen?” Eyeball asked.

“Eyeball,” he said. “What a nice big old shock to hear your voice. Yeah, I got it up and I see it. ’Nother SCORE?”

“Nope,” Eyeball said. “ ’Nother ship.” There was something in her tone of voice, something strained under the wiseguy tone.

“Say again? What the hell other ship could Earth send to join the party? Some cargo craft they goosed through?”

“None of above, big guy. Ship from Solar Area. From Pluto. Ring o‘ Charon, if ya wanna believe their ID codes.”

Windbag stared at nothing at all for a good five seconds, trying to deal with that information, but somehow it just couldn’t get inside his head.

“Say again?”

“I say it’s a god-damned ship from Pluto with the god-damned old Autocrat himself along for the ride.”

“Autocrat? Ceres Autocrat? The Big Cold Fish himself?” None too surprisingly, the Naked Purple movement had never gotten along well with the Autocrat of Ceres.

“Stand by, Wind. Yeah, you bet. Got him on the viddy now, wriggling on the slab with his gills flapping.”

“He sick? Hurt?” Windbag asked, suddenly alarmed. No one wanted to be the guy in charge when the Autocrat keeled over. His followers might take a dim view.

“Huh? Naw, he’s okay. But he’s sure a Fish outta water. Who’s gonna do what he says here?”

“Ah. Oh. Got it.” Sometimes Purpspeak was a bit too colorful.

But a ship from Pluto, from Solar Area? How could that be? What did it mean?

Well, one thing fershure. Had to talk to these people.

Gerald MacDougal stood by the entrance to the lock, and nothing in the Universe mattered but the fact that the lock was about to open. Marcia. Here. Now. Alive.

Shattered Spheres and invisible objects that killed SCORES and wormhole transits to habs full of lunatics. None of it was of the least importance. Marcia. Here.

It was impossible, it couldn’t be true, and it was happening. Five years and more since he had last seen her, since he had touched her. Five years since the Charonians had torn them apart—and now the Autarch of Ceres and NaPurHab were bringing them together. It made no sense at all, but that didn’t matter either.

The airlock hatch swung partway open, and then paused for a moment. Gerald stepped forward, his heart slamming in his chest.

And then the hatch swung clear, and she stepped through.

Marcia. Here.

They were in each other’s arms before either of them knew it. His body remembered the feel of her close and warm against him, and some part of himself that had been lost for far too long was suddenly there again. He breathed in the smell of her hair, wrapped his arms around her and held her. Never again. Never again would they be separated.

They let go of each other just enough so that they could take that quarter step back to look in each other’s eyes, and he knew that he was seeing what she saw. An age line or two, a grey hair that had not been there before—but none of that mattered either. The last five years had not happened. They had always been together, and they always would be.

She reached her hand up and caressed the side of his face, pulled him close, and they kissed.

They drew back again, after a time, and looked at each other again. “Hello, Gerald,” Marcia said, her voice warm and low. “Did you miss me?”

Sianna Colette sat and listened, sat and watched, as the meeting lumbered on. There he was. That was him. Larry Chao, the man, the monster, the ogre who had caused the Abduction. She—or at least her subconscious— had been expecting someone nine feet tall with fangs. But not a man, a rather ordinary, shy, gentle-looking man with dark hair and a haunted look in his eyes.

But there were other matters in hand. “There is no doubt in my mind at all,” Chao was saying. “The object that Miss Colette and Mr. Sturgis have been tracking is the Adversary, the danger that terrifies the Sphere that holds Earth captive. The danger that could kill Earth and everything on it. The Multisystem Sphere will not hesitate to throw Earth at the Adversary in order to kill it.”

“How canbe that?” Eyekill said. “Can’t quite believe it’d take Earth-smash to clobber that thing. Wally, Adversary is what size, tops?”

“No way to know,” Wally said. “My really rough guess is that it is about the size of a very small asteroid. Say, less than a kilometer across. Maybe a lot less.”

“How massive is it?” Captain Steiger asked.

“Well,” Wally said, “We’ve tracked a bunch of debris within orbits perturbed by near passes of the Adversary. We can work from there directly into a computation of its gravitation, and thus its mass. It comes out to something on the order of a lunar mass.”

“It weighs as much as the Moon and it’s too small to see?” Steiger asked.

Wally shrugged and smiled. “Strange matter is pretty strange,” he said.

“There is not much funny about this, Sturgis,” Steiger said. “A mass the size of the Moon striking the Earth is not a joking matter.”

“But would it even work?” MacDougal asked. “I mean, would it kill the Adversary? It seems to me that this Adversary has taken a lot of punishment.”

“Should work great,” Eyeball said. “Charos accelerate Earth to high-nuff speed, you bet. Force equal mass times acceleration. Big enough mass, enuff accel, no prob.”

“Nuff to zap strange matter?” the Windbag asked. “Turn it to normal matter or mebbe energy? E-equals-MC-square it?”

E = MC². That phrase tickled something in Sianna’s memory. Not the formula itself. But sometime, somewhere, when someone had said it. What had it been about? Suddenly this meeting seemed very familiar, as if she had been through all this before. Some other meeting, or bull session, or whatever, when someone had not been believed and that equation had come up in conversation.

“Don’t think so,” Eyeball was saying. “But you can kill me without turning my body into energy pulse. High-speed impact with Earth oughta benuff to break bonds between strange atoms, reduce Adversary to thin cloud of by-themself atoms. Kill it bigtime.”

“Sides, if it don’t work, Earth death anyho,” the Windbag pointed out. “Adversary kills Sphere, Earth loses orbit, and whammo.”

“That’s getting just a bit off the point, isn’t it?” Steiger said. “I really don’t care how Earth would die. I don’t want Earth to die in the first place.”

“Which brings us,” the Autocrat said, “back, once again, to the question of alternatives. Is there anything we can do?”

“How about wrecking the wormhole?” Sondra Berghoff asked. “We could blow up the Ring around the black hole so it couldn’t be used to tune and amplify the wormhole signal.”

Gerald MacDougal shook his head. “If that would do any good,” he said, “then the Charonians would have done it long ago.”

“The Ring’s dormant anyway,” Sianna said. “We can detect a few trace signals to show it could be activated, but it didn’t power up at all when the SCOREs or our ships came through. The other side provided all the power and control.” Something in her own words teased at the idea in the back of her head. Dormant. Not dead. Dormant.

“And presumably the Adversary would do the honors for its own transit,” Captain Steiger said. “Besides, I don’t know that we could rig up powerful enough bombs to be sure of destroying the ring—and the SCOREs on guard duty around the wormhole aperture would take out our missiles anyway.”

“How about some sort of particle beam at the Adversary?” MacDougal suggested. “Something with enough directed energy to do some damage. Maybe induce the strange matter to reform into normal matter.”

“Sure, no problem, if we had a twenty-year research schedule and an unlimited budget and a hell of a lot of luck,” Steiger replied. “Besides, none of us are particle physicists. Where would we even begin?”

“Could we be diverting?” Eyeball asked.

The Autocrat frowned and turned to look at her. “I beg your pardon?”

“Divert it. Shunt the Adversary some other way ’sides through the wormhole?”

Yes. Yes. That was it. Or at least it was close. Sianna looked from one face to the next. One more hint, one more notion from the outside, and she would have it. She knew she would.

“How?” the Autocrat asked.

Sianna looked hard at Eyeball, willing her to give an answer that would set free the idea Sianna was trying to have.

Eyeball shrugged. “Dunno.”

Oh, hell. No joy there. All illusion anyway. There was no idea— just the wish for one, so strong it made her think she was really close to something.

“Could we divert to the Solar System?” the Autocrat asked. “Find some way to retune the wormhole so the Adversary came out there instead of the Multisystem?”

There was a moment’s shocked silence, no one quite sure what to say. But then Eyeballer Maximus Lock-on found words. “You cold fish or loonie? Set that thing loose in Solar Area? How many it kill there?”

“I see no reason for it to kill anyone at all in the Solar System,” the Autocrat said, rather primly. The Purps obviously irritated him deeply. For some reason, their determination to call it the Solar Area seemed to be the thing that grated most on him. “It is in search of the sort of energy source the Charonians’ Spheres contain. There is no such there.”

“But what’s to stop the Adversary from using the Ring of Charon or the Lunar Wheel and the Earthpoint Singularity to link back to the Multisystem?” Sondra asked. “It knows where the Multisystem is now, and it doesn’t seem like the sort to give up easy.”

“And it’s awfully optimistic to assume it would do no damage in the Solar System. How do we know that it wouldn’t decide it could dine on the Sun in a pinch? Suppose you’re wrong?” Captain Steiger asked.

“Then many people might well die, including many of my own citizens—but far fewer than if the Earth were destroyed. But let me ask again. Do we have the capacity to change the coordinates on the wormhole aperture, and send the Adversary to some other location?”

“Well, yes, I suppose,” Sondra Berghoff said. “We can’t shut it off altogether, but we might be able to change the settings—but only to a valid tuning. And the only tuning we know is the Ring of Charon.”

“With all due respect,” Gerald MacDougal said, “that’s not a solution. It’s gambling with mass murder. Suppose we divert the Adversary to the Solar System and it wreaks havoc there, and then it heads for the Multisystem. Your solution might result in the last surviving humans being those of us here in the Shattered Sphere system.”

The Autocrat’s face grew stern and angry, and he nodded rather curtly. “Your points are all well taken. But these are desperate times, and we may well be forced to make desperate choices. I will withdraw my suggestion—for now.”

There was silence again in the room, and the definite feel of tension rising. Tempers were starting to fray.

“I still have trouble believing in the damned Adversary,” Steiger said, in a tone of voice that suggested she was speaking as much to change the subject as anything else. “Is there any chance that we’ve got this wrong? That there’s something else going on? Something we’ve missed?”

Sondra Berghoff shook her head. “Not that I can see. Believe me, I want to be wrong. Up until we got here and heard about this invisible object smashing SCOREs to dust, we didn’t have any direct proof besides the data Larry got out of the Lunar Wheel. But everything here corroborates those images.”

“But the idea that it would take impact with a planet to stop something that small. How could that be?”

“How could something that small kill a whole Sphere system?” Sondra replied. “But it did. Look around you.”

“But that’s not proof—”

“Please! Please!” the Autocrat called out. “Come now, we have covered all this, and time is short. We can’t spend time going around and around in circles.”

And that was it. Good God, that was it. Sianna sat stock still, holding her breath, working it through. Yes. It would work. Right now, if they started this minute. Everything they needed had come together. It would not have been possible before the Terra Nova and the Autarch arrived, and it would be too late all too soon. But now. Now the tide was at its crest. It could be done.

She stopped listening to the conversation and grabbed Wally by the arm, digging her fingers deep in. “Wally,” she whispered, leaning in close to him. “Around in circles,” she said. “We can send it around in circles.”

Wally turned and looked at her, clearly puzzled. But then it clicked. She could see it in his eyes, the way his eyebrows twitched. “Yeah,” he whispered back. He thought for a minute, and then frowned. “At least I think we could. Maybe. There’s a lot we’d have to—”

“Mr. Sturgis. Miss Colette. Is there something you’d like to contribute to the discussion?” the Autocrat said, cutting into their private conversation in the classic, sarcastic tones of a pompous teacher chiding an unruly student.

Sianna looked up at him, and opened her mouth, but the words jammed up in her throat. Every trip to the principal’s office, every social and scholastic disaster of her childhood suddenly flashed through Sianna’s mind all over again. She swallowed hard and wished she could just slide under the table. It was absurd. She had a good idea—a wonderful idea. But the Autocrat’s sarcasm had her rooted to the spot, as helpless as a jacklighted deer in a hunter’s sights.

Fortunately, however, Wally wasn’t much for noticing sarcasm. He grinned and nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I think we’ve got plenty.”